I needed a computer controllable 32 channel light dimmer for an art installation. After looking around a bit I found out that there isn’t even a Arduino shield for the work. So I made a quick 4 channel stackable board to control lights. The board uses SHARP thyristor based solid state relays to switch mains voltage. As normal with thyristors – all the outputs can be used as dimmers through zero-crossing detection. All outputs are able to handle 0.9 A / 200 W. We connected 40 W incandescent light bulbs to it but you can control whatever with it – lights, electronics, computers, motors etc.

The control circuit in Figure 1a allows you to manually adjust the power delivered to a load. By changing the setting of potentiometer R3, you change the phase angle at which the thyristor (Q3) fires (Figure 1b), thereby altering the load current’s duty cycle. The adjustment range is about 0 to 180°. Q3’s off time is linear with R3, but of course the resulting load power is not linear with R3.

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With this tool you can test various electronic components like diodes, LEDs, all kinds of transistors (PNP, NPN, several types of MOSFETs), capacitors, resistors as well as triacs and thyristors. It will show you several physical characteristics after the test was completed, like forward voltages, (gate) capacity and amplification factor. More over, it will show the polarity of the component and identifies the several pins of a package. A very nice and sophisticated project I host for Markus Frejek. I’ve done an additional layout for the device you can see on the left side. This project has found a lot of fans, including myself. The device is powered by an AVR ATmega 8 MCU.

It’s built around an ATmega8 IC that interfaces with a standard HD44780 16×2 character LCD. The circuit that does the testing is simplicity itself. Three pairs of resistors are connected to 6 pins of the microcontroller, and each pair is connected on the other end to one of the transistor pins.

The theory of operation is also relatively simple. The microcontroller cycles through different patterns on its output pins until a recognizable pattern is read on its input pins. It supports a very large range of devices: